21 hours ago, Numex said:

Since we are in a closed group of married couples, there is more, sometimes much more, to our relationships than just sex.  We don't just get together for couples swaps or group sex, often times there are dates.  In our case, my wife often goes out with another couple while I'll go out with just another man's wife.

 

Thinking about it, for us at least, although these dates often end up with sex, they end up less often than when we are together with one or more other couples, which is almost 100% having sex as a conclusion.  Then there are the calls from specific other partners just for sex.  Daniela gets (and makes) those calls more than I do.

This does sound like a fun dynamic and where we may end up in a few years when the kids are out of the house, but for the time being we pretty much only play together and only even really see LS friends together.  In fact, our schedule barely affords us time with vanilla friends apart.  

We certainly don't want to wish away our time with the kids, but it does get extremely  exhausting when you've gotta make adult social plans 6 weekends in advance and we may not even be in the mood to talk about that stuff when the window to actually plan it exists.  

Hi all! Hope you are all well, hoping for some advice on my situational drama... So I have been with my partner for several years with a break and we are happy. He is not completely emotionally available however tries his best and is very much open about swinging and communication a out sex, fantasies etc.

We have been on our swinging journey for about 4 months and have had some soft play encounters however no full swap or sex yet. I have enjoyed seeing him experience oral and he is keen for me to get brave in experiencing more things.

Currently we are at logger heads in our approach to swinging... His approach is it is just sex, he doesn't care about the people he fucks, sorry to be crude... And that they are simply a real life replacement for porn....

On the flip side I am worrying about finding a person or couple I feel comfortable with, do not see them as just fucks and feel that some sort of humanity is required in order to connect with people.

I have a past of trauma which probably doesn't help however my current biggest Insecurities are around my mom tum and general child bearing wobble..alongside fears of not being good enough. 

We are members of a swinging site and I have chatted with some lovely people in the sense of getting to know them however my partner feels I overkill chats and talk irrelevant things when in fact I should be focussing simply on the sex and nothing more.

I guess my question is am I being over familiar and friendly with people I should simply be viewing as sex, and if so then am I even cut out for this life as I genuinely do care about people and humanity and have a career in this exact path. 

I am aware my partner's views is purely around sex with no real care for the person beyond looks however I am unable to think in this way. I'd like an insight into how others view this.

Any views would be appreciated so I or we can try to meet each other in the middle and find a good ground to proceed xx

OR...CNN is trying desperately to get it's ratings up.

We had a hard and fast rule of condom use. We were never talked out of it.

We met with some couples who would have rather gone bareback. If they stuck to their guns, we simply didn't play with them.

When we met with single gentlemen, we stated our rule. If there was any pushback at all, they didn't play with Mary.

19 hours ago, Numex said:

For purposes of this thread the question remains, however - when did you two become non-monogamous?  Were you already committed to a life of non-monogamy before you met?  Was it later, but still early on, before you were married?  Was it during the early stages of marriage?  Or was it as empty nesters moving into a different stage of your lives?  Whenever it was, in retrospect, would you have done anything differently?

 

  

 

 

Our journey was perhaps different than most. We were very much vanilla for the first decade and a half of our marriage. Work tensions were taking their toll; we decided to take a clothing-optional vacation. (Offspring remained home with grandma, of course. ) It was our first contact with foray into/contact with alternative lifestyles. It was an eye-opening experience. We showed up at Club Orient because we were frankly ambivalent and found ourselves among a couple of hundred naked people who were at once comfortable, joyful, and at peace with the world. They looked us in the eye when they spoke with us and although they sensed our awkwardness, they were completely non-judgmental. We shucked our suits within a few minutes and never looked back. So transformational and restorative was our experience that we booked a return trip before we left the property. 

While nudity and swinging are (obviously) not the same, both are alternative lifestyles, and both involve exchanging some (vanilla) social norms for alternatives. What mattered here is how that exchange made us feel -- about ourselves, about each other, about the rest of the world.  We would say that we had a need for that exchange and we felt that the exchange was the right thing for us at the time. That experience opened up the discussion of how much of our lives were governed by social norms and what exchanges we were interested in exploring.  Our point is that being born/raised in a vanilla environment often blurs the distinction between behaviors that are regulated by law and behaviors that are expected by convention.  "Right" and "wrong" is applied to both.  Exchanging vanilla norms for those of an alternative lifestyle requires suspension and reassignment of "right" and "wrong" to different specific behaviors. Our point is that there is always an exchange, it's never a simple change from wrong to right (or vice versa). 

We think different people --and different couples--are differently prepared to make those exchanges. We made the exchange because vanilla life was not getting us where we needed to be as a couple. Would we have been prepared to relinquish the "comfort and security" of vanilla life earlier in our relationship? Don't know, but we doubt it.